killjoy circuits

Meet with us this Thursday, August 22 2013 for session 3 of The Affective State. We will be reading Sara Ahmed’s “Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness” and Dierdra Reber’s “Headless Capitalism: Affect as Free-Market Episteme.” The readings are about 45 pages in total. We shift, slightly, from the philosophical in order to retain a political engagement with affect. We’ve contended with the elusive and unsettling [anomalia] aspects of affect, and continue to come to the question “what is it?” – the only thing that indeed establishes a grounds. Reber’s grapples with the tensions of affect in late capitalism and points to its emergence as a free-market episteme, a “new avatar” that has not been thoroughly apprehended by criticism. Negativity should be properly expressed, fuck you very much. Ahmed writes, “Do we consent to happiness? And what are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness?” – she looks at the breakdown of happiness and determines how it functions and works. She intends “to kill joy” and, much in the same way the negative or dread has been realized as a transformative turn, recognizes that to kill joy “is to open a life, to make room for possibility, for chance.”